Mycowood (migh-koh-wood)

Not Quite Lumber

The Jeweled Lands are home to massive "forests" of towering mushrooms (the giant canopycap, n. gargantua, each stalk easily over twenty feet high with caps larger than houses. These gargantuan fungi have handily outcompeted trees in the otherwise loose soil. Save for a few copses at the foot of the Kaleido Mountains, the Jeweled Lands are almost entirely without legitimate wood, and so construction crews must make do with the spongy, porous, and colorful mycowood. Mycowood is not without its benefits: it is lightweight, pliable, and grows quickly. Its abundance and ease of use were what made the Age of Expansion so successful in the Jeweled Lands. Almost all buildings in southern countries that aren't hewn from stone are built with mycowood.

Fast Construction

Unprocessed, mycowood is known as "mycospeld", and is scarcely rigid enough to hold up its own weight. Canopycaps are organisms of almost pure earth essentia, but their constant exposure to wind essentia alters their physical structure enough to render them spongy and light. Using a process known as "essential conversion", specialist fungijacks trained in the intricacies of these metaphysical properties convert the spongy mycospeld into hardened mycowood. Working alone, one fungijack can convert up to half a house's worth of planks in a day; this is generally the only bottleneck in production, as all other processes (such as sawing, planing and sizing) can be done effortlessly by even unskilled laborers. Thanks to this ease of processing, mycowood was directly responsible for the rapid expansion of southern countries in the earliest decades of the Age of Exploration.

A Culture of Color

Due to the omnipresence of mycowood, many traditions exist surrounding its colors and usage. For instance, it is considered good luck among the naiadeem people to use shades of blue when constructing a place of rest, such as a hospital or inn. This system of belief has permeated a number of other aspects of Jeweled Land culture, leading to trends in clothing styles and jewelry adornment to follow similar lines of coloration. The most consistent associations are that of blue with rest, red with joviality, yellow with intellectualism, and purple with wealth. High-class citizens often wear a combination of these colors in particular sequences to indicate their family line.

Type

Wood